Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone
by Seaouryou
Summary: Kenny McCormick, 22. Drop out, drug addict, deadbeat father... and prophet, unless the angels are pulling his leg. Wouldn't be the first time. Now the Church's got an assassin after him, Cartman's on another power trip, and Uriel won't stop freeloading.
1. Preamble

I've never written a fic like this before. Different narration style, no clue as to how to end it or even what the general plot should be... expect nothing and you _might_ not be disappointed. The stated goal of this fic: provide innuendo for everyone/everyone, and then leave them all single in the end... or in one big orgy? Only time and my compulsive girlish whims will tell.

**Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone**

_01. Preamble_

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Before we get into it, Kenny wants to assure you that he is the victim here.

Okay, okay, so he dropped out of Park County Community College, the easiest community college in the nation. And so he dumped his girlfriend when she told him she was pregnant. And so maybe he has a _touch_ of a morphine addiction. Still: _he_ is the wronged party most deserving of your sympathy.

If you believe _that_, we assume you'll believe anything, which will come in very handy whilst reading this.

And for now some background:

Kenny McCormick, town degenerate, has become a homeowner at the tender age of 22. This is because his father is in jail, his mother has run away with the car mechanic, his brother is in the navy, and his little sister has gotten married and moved out. (Five months later they were blessed with a baby boy.) And so the house was thrust upon Kenny, and the leaky roof and broken window(s) and rotting back steps and malfunctioning furnace where added to his already-burdened shoulders. It is to this home that Kenny is now returning. His truck broke down weeks ago, and so (because the town is without a mechanic at the moment) he is walking the three miles back along the highway, in the snow, and if he were to get frostbite and fall down dead... well, that's (his) life.

We suppose that now is a good time to revisit the drug addiction, just in case you are feeling sympathetic. We would like to test the assertion that a good story must have a protagonist the audience can root for.

When Kenny was 15, he decided he wanted a better lot in life than his parents. Some people would have buckled down in school, gotten a job, and started saving.

Kenny returned to shock thrills for quick cash.

But this was a post-_Jackass_ world. Everyone, everywhere was desensitized. Oh, they'd say, you're going to eat the raw eternal organs of endangered aquatic mammals? Ho hum. Seen it before.

Kenny despaired, and dropped some acid with Kyle, and then it came to him in a flash of brilliance: he merely had to do what he did best. The generation that could not be shocked would undoubtedly pay good money to watch a guy die in new and creative ways.

He was right, but he found it to be surprisingly painful. And so, in another stoke of genius, he started shooting up morphine before performances. He did well, extremely well, at first. But soon the cost of the morphine canceled out the profits from the show, and he was right back where he started - plus a serious addiction and a physically exhausting career.

In fact, Kenny is at this very moment walking home from the hospital. Craig, being a nurse, is his morphine dealer. Craig also moonlights at the middle school, teaching sign language as an elective course. We will allow you a moment to indulge in the imagine of him as a kind mentor to school children or, more probably, in a slutty nurse costume administrating some sort of medication to a tweaked-out Tweek, before dashing these cozy mental images by reminding you that he is stealing morphine and selling it to a junkie. We will go on to tell you that he is the sort of nurse that would hold a pillow over the face of a terminal patient, and that he has slept/is sleeping with a considerable portion of the hospital.

If you are wondering what happened to the rest of the South Park children, we will digress from Kenny to tell you that Stan is in L.A. being spit on by producers, Kyle has recently finished college and joined a firm, and Cartman is missing, presumed dead. We remind you that this is Kenny's assumption - we know precisely where Cartman is, what he's doing, and even why he's doing it; and in due time we will let Kenny know, too.

"Hey, Uriel," Kenny calls out as he enters his home, ramming the broken door with his shoulder to get it to open and then, closed. He drops the stack of bills he fished from his dented mailbox on the coffee table next to the door and, kicking off his boots as he goes, walks from the living room to the kitchen. He removes a beer from the refrigerator, pops the cap off with his belt buckle, takes two morphine tablets, and then washes them down.

"Can we order Chinese for dinner?" Uriel calls over the sound of the sitcom he is watching while Kenny mentally calculates how much money he has after buying his pills against how much he owes the Gas & Electric Co. Finding it significantly disproportionate, he wanders back into living room and frowns at Uriel, whose wings are taking up the entire couch.

"How many times do I have to ask you to tuck those in?"

"Tuck them in? Tuck them _in?_ That's like asking a man to tuck his dick in!"

If there is one truth Kenny has learned about angels, particularly archangels, it is that they are very touchy about their wings, and like to boast about their wingspan. He owes it to the fact that they have no genitalia.

... And about that. Kenny found the angel around two weeks ago, and he has been freeloading on Kenny's couch ever since. More specifically, Kenny literally stumbled over the angel, passed out face-down on his front yard, while he was taking his trash out one morning. Uriel has steadfastly claimed that he didn't _fall_ from heaven, he just stepped out for a tad because Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel have that "Three Mucketeers" thing going and they're always leaving him out, and earlier they were putting their heads together and whispering and then snickering and when he asked what they were talking about they said Nothing, but he just _knows_ they were talking about him.

Kenny wouldn't mind having him around quite so much if he ate less and chipped in more, but there's little he can do about it.

"So?" Uriel prompts. "Chinese food?"

"Sure, why not," Kenny says, scratching his neck. "I'll call Shitty Wok in a bit." He prefers to call it this than it's legal name.

There's a knock on the door, which surprises Kenny. The Gas & Electric Co. don't muscle someone for cash, they merely shut off your power; and whatever other mistakes Kenny may make, he does not rack up gambling debts. He goes to the window, glances out, and sees a twenty-something man standing on his front porch.

We will refrain from giving you a physical description of him, because we are sorely tempted to describe him in this way: _He took up three-fourths of the frame. His head was particularly circular and his hair color was #6b4d12. His dramatic pose was a tribute to the excellent animation and technical supervisors._ Instead, know that he is wearing heavy army boots, a large jacket, and looks to Kenny like the kind of man who never gets tired of Chuck Norris jokes. We happen to know that Kenny is correct, but he isn't the sort of man to laugh out loud at them - just smirk to himself.

Kenny opens the door after much yanking, and the man takes one final drag on his cigarette before flicking it off to the side.

"Kenny McCormick?"

"Yes?" Kenny says, and then the man takes a gun out from his oversized jacket and shoots Kenny directly between the eyes.


	2. Dante Could Have Never Fathomed

After seeing last week's episode, I am forced to acknowledge that the one true Cartman pairing is Cartman/Everyone... boy's gonna follow in his momma's whorish footsteps. Odds of story ending in an orgy are up!

**Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone**

_02. Dante Could Have Never Fathomed_

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"What the fuck was _that?_"

Kenny is on his knees in his poorly lit bathroom, his head bent under the bathtub faucet and his hand on the knob above him, adjusting the temperature of the water that is gushing out over the back of his skull.

His vulgar exclamation was directed toward Uriel, who is seated on the toilet, watching him. Uriel clears his throat.

"Kenny," he says, trying to sound as regal as someone can sound while sitting on a toilet in a cramped, dingy bathroom, "I think it is time I revealed to you the true reason I am here."

"The other angels voted and kicked you out?" Finally hitting the right combination of hot and cold, Kenny removes his hand from the knob and combs his fingers through his wet hair, washing away the largest chunks of brain and fractured skull. He then goes to work massaging his skin; Kenny is face down, staring straight at the drain, and he digs at his hair with his fingernails until the water swirling down it loses its red tinge.

"No!" Uriel huffs, indignant. "I'm here to protect you."

"Bang up job you're doing, then." Kenny shuts off the water, stands, and towels off. He looks at his reflection above the sink and runs a hand over the back of his head, feeling smooth, unmarred skin.

If Kenny is thankful of anything, it is that no evidence of his continuous deaths is left on his body. He knows that he would look like something slightly less than human by now, if it did.

The nature of how, exactly, Kenny is restored to life has always been odd and inexplicable - even to him. But for your convenience, we will give you two basic laws: 1) it took at the very least a day to come back, usually a week, at the very most a few months; 2) he faded back into the world the way a movie would fade to a new scene, looking as if his death had never occurred - and as far as the world was concerned, it hadn't.

You'll notice we are using the past tense. The nature of Kenny's resurrection changed quite abruptly during his middle school years and, lacking any other explanation, Kenny had always attributed it to puberty. Suddenly, Kenny came back within mere hours of dying, reanimated in the same body, still unblemished but now covered in the gore of his most recent demise. Kenny'd been quite disturbed the first time it happened, when he was shocked to regain consciousness by the highway, blood still in the snow and several pounds of internal organs strewn across his lap.

Kenny threw up, and then Kenny scrambled to his feet and sprinted back to town until his legs were sore. He grabbed hold of a fence post, paying no mind to the barbed wire, and clutched the furiously beating heart under his ribcage that he had seen ripped out in the snow.

Sure, Kenny had died literally hundreds of times before, but he'd never seen the _result_ of death. Death had always been strangely sanitized to him.

Now, he is used to it. While Kenny looks in the mirror, he is only annoyed about getting blood on his shirt.

"Kenny, you're a prophet," Uriel blurts out.

Kenny laughs. "Good one."

"I'm serious!"

"Uriel," Kenny says, stretching his hands out, "_look_ at me." Uriel looks, from the bony frame to the messy hair to the faded, torn, blood-strained clothes. "I barely completed high school and gave up on college after less than a year. I eat fast food for four out of five meals. I probably have more morphine in my system than blood. Do I _look_ like a prophet to you?"

"Well... you are. That's why I'm here. That's why that man shot you. His name in The Mole and-"

"His name is _Mole?_"

"Well... yes-"

"What sort of sadistic parents name their kid _Mole?_ What, did the condom break and they wanted revenge?"

"It's an alias."

"So he picked it _himself?_ That's even weirder. Why not _Cobra?_ Were all the good names already taken?"

"Kenny, would you please focus? The Catholic Church sent him to eliminate you because of what you mean to 21st century religion."

Kenny snorts. "Uriel, I'm no saint."

"Prophet."

"I'm not that, either! Religious icons are supposed to be, like... virtuous and shit."

"Kenny," Uriel says, placing the tips of his fingers together and looking at him seriously, "you could single-handedly change what every man, woman, and child on this earth thinks of religion. One word from you could send the Buddhists from their temples, Shintoists from their shrines, Muslims from their mosques... and Catholics from their church. And that's not going to fly with Ben Proutly, so he hired someone to get rid of you."

"Who?"

"A very holy man, very invested in the church. He's in line for the Papacy."

"This is fucking stupid," Kenny says.

"It is not! Kenny, you're the last intermediary. You've lived with the numinous on his plane and you perceive the workings of the afterlife more clearly than you do the workings of this life. If ever there was a man deserving of the title Prophet, it is you."

It is true that Kenny knows things about the afterlife that no one else would dream up. He's spoken to God and Satan, seen Heaven and every layer of Hell; Kenny knows that God is a Buddhist, knows that God thinks Pope jokes are very funny, knows that God created the universe one day when he got high; Kenny knows that Hell is less about torturing its residents and more about inconveniencing them, knows that it is a Mecca for intellectuals/singers/writers/philosophers/comedians/playwrights/revolutionaries/activists/innovators, knows that Jagger has no idea how right he was.

"Knock off the thesaurus-speak, Uriel," Kenny says. Uriel pouts. "This _IS_ stupid. What am I going to do, drive around town with a megaphone, shouting the truth to the masses? And why is the Church suddenly coming after me _now?_ And don't they realize killing me is the least efficient way to get rid of me? And if 'protecting' me is so fucking important, why'd they send _you?_"

You do not see the plot holes. You do not see the plot holes. You do not see the plot holes...

Instead of answering, Uriel tears up. "I'm doing the best that I can! You just don't understand what it's like to be ridiculed whenever you try to offer suggestions..."

Kenny rolls his eyes, tears off some toilet paper and hands it to Uriel, who daps at his eyes and blows his nose. This is, for the record, the correct protocol when you have a biblical figure weeping in your bathroom. We doubt you'll ever be so inconvenienced, but better to be prepared.

"So," Uriel says once he's calmed down, "the Church has found you here. We have to leave."

"But if I miss a mortgage payment, they'll foreclose on my house."

"This is more important!"

Kenny sighs. "Fine. Though I don't see why." You may not, either. That's okay. Confusion whilst reading this is natural, nay, expected. We recommend less thinking.

"Good. Do you have any family you could stay with?"

Obliviously not, as we explained in _Preamble_. Kenny snorts and Uriel says, "Oh, right. What about friends?"

"I don't have any friends."

"_Everyone_ has friends."

"_You_ don't."

Uriel gets teary again but manages to compose himself. "There must be someone."

"I have a dealer."

"Um..."

"Craig's all right. Of course, once I crashed at his house and woke up to find him frisking me... he said he was trying to steal my wallet, but everyone knows I never have any cash."

"Um... How about old friends from school?" Uriel suggests.

Kenny's face screws up. Cartman is dead (he assumes, but you and we know better) and Kyle... he does not want to see Kyle. They experienced a falling-out the last year of high school, which Kenny refers to as The Broflovski/McCormick Split, Version 2.0. Okay, so they'd never been **best friends** the way their dads had, but Kyle liked hanging out with Kenny because they could do all the things Stan was morally opposed to, like drugs and graffiti and ditching school, and Kenny liked hanging out with Kyle because he thought he was a genuinely cool dude. But then senior year rolled around, and family pressure got to him, and he completely blew Kenny off because he was a "bad influence."

"There's Stan," Kenny finally says. "He gave me his phone number and address when he moved to L.A., but I haven't heard from him in a year."

"To Los Angeles, then!" Uriel declares, standing up and whacking his head on the cabniet above the toilet. He clutches his head and says "God _Damn_ it!" and Kenny smirks.

"Didn't know archangels were allowed to talk like that."

Uriel coughs. "We'll travel by the fastest means possible."

"FedEx?"

"... Okay, the second fastest means possible. One employed by messengers on the next plane to travel from Heaven to Hell with only a little jet lag."

"... An airline for angels."

"Well, _yes_, if you want to take all the magic out of it."

Unfortunately, Uriel doesn't consider that Kenny's mortal body isn't equipped to handle this sort of travel, and his body is in shreds five minutes into the journey. Uriel is stuck trying to explain to the woman in customs why he's lugging around a corpse.


	3. DICK! we're going to title these chapter

Was Lice Capades great or was Lice Capades great? Most Kenny-time since Best Friends Forever (? unless I'm forgetting one), and just when I was whining about him being fazed out, too. Thought for sure the episode was going to be a Horton Hears a Who rip-off at first.

**Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone**

_03. DICK! (we're going to title these chapters however we damn well please)_

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There are two ways to make it in show business: knowing some dick, or sucking a whole lot of dick. After a year of getting no where with the former, Stan Marsh is considering the latter.

The constant barrage of rejection would be easier for him to take if he thought he were an untalented hack, but he, clearly, doesn't. Stan doesn't think of himself as a teenaged runaway girl, coming to Hollywood with the expectation of becoming a dancer/singer/actress, despite the two left feet/flat voice/disfigured face. He always thought growing up in South Park gave him a special appreciation for the bizarre, a certain dark sense of humor that would appeal to the average TV watcher. If he could just get someone to listen to a pitch, he knows it could be a successful show.

Unfortunately, as it stands, he is the only person that knows how brilliant he is. It's the hurtle every self-important genius must face. One of Stan's two roommates faces the same: he is writing the next great American novel, which no one will ever read, because in two weeks he will be shot down in crossfire.

That's life. Too bad, because it would have been groundbreaking.

Stan's other roommate is none other than Wendy Testaburger. After a turbulent on-again/off-again relationship, Wendy spontaneously ran away with Stan when he went to L.A. Stan was surprised and very pleased, but did not consider it suspicious in the least. You should.

To pay for his share of the rent, Stan has to work two jobs as a waiter at two different "Italian food" restaurants. Incidentally, they are right next door to each other, and bitter rivals. The plus side of this is that Stan is never late for work. The downside, sometimes he'll forget and wear the wrong uniform.

Stan is having one of _those_ days, and as he returns to his apartment, exhausted, all he wants to do is eat some of the Chinese food Loren Swanson—and if only he's taken the bus instead of his car, the whole world would have known that name!—orders for "inspiration", curl up on the coach with Wendy, and watch some Conan. The _last_ thing he wants to deal with is an old high school friend, a hypersensitive archangel, and (yet another) Church conspiracy.

But as Stan is sitting on his couch, unlacing his shoes, he hears heavy footsteps out in the hall, and a familiar voice—somewhat muffled by the closed door—saying, "... people in this city are a lot uglier than I thought they'd be. Where are all the young actress-hopefuls? Oh, shit, Uriel, watch out-" a loud clattering follows, which sounds like (and is) a portrait being knocked off the wall.

_Don't knock, don't knock..._ Stan silently prays. They knock. He sighs, stands, and opens the door for Kenny and Uriel.

Stan's first impression(s): Angel. New one, but no weirder than anything else he's ever seen. Kenny. Thinner, dirtier, hair longer, bloodier... blood? Double take. Yes, in addition to the usually wear and tear, Kenny's clothes have the unmistakable brown strains on them. Stan's concern for his fellow man is instantly activated, and closing the door and watching Conan is no longer an option.

Kenny's first impression(s): Stan. Goatee doesn't suit him. Shirt has been half-untucked from his belt. Is holding a left shoe for some indiscernible reason. Conclusion, living with Wendy has turned him into a hairy madman who can't dress himself. Nice apartment, though.

Stan steps back and opens the door wider, and Kenny enters. He has to maneuver a little to get Uriel through the threshold (wings, you know), whose weight he is supporting, and whom he drops ungracefully on the couch the moment he can.

"Sorry," Kenny says to Stan, "he's a little jet lagged."

Stan stares at the angel that has been dumped on the couch he'd hoped to spoon with Wendy on. "Of course."

Silence.

"So you're probably wondering what the fuck I'm doing here," Kenny says, coughing into a closed fist.

"Well, not in so many words."

Kenny grins a little."Uriel here—well, it was his idea, so he'd probably explain it better—but the _gist_ of it is that Uriel thinks I'm in mortal danger."

"Are you?" Stan asks.

"When _aren't_ I? C'mon, Stan. I just get shot by this assassin, and the the next thing you know Uriel is sprouting off about me being a prophet and this Ben guy being out to get me..."

"_What?_"

"I know, it's ridicu-"

"Some guy's got an _assassin_ after you?"

Kenny looks at Stan's face, and Kenny sees exactly what he'd hoped not to—the welling of Stan's instinctive "I'm worried about you/let me help you" response to other people's problems. They are all symptoms of Stan's nice guy syndrome, and it never fails to make Kenny feel guilty because he _isn't_ such a nice guy, and really doesn't deserve the treatment.

"Look, Stan, it's not your problem. Hell, it's not really a problem at all. I'm sorry about barging in on you, really, Uriel's just a bitch to deal with when he starts bawling and it's easier to appease him, but I shouldn't have made the trip out here. Great seeing you, though, nice chin fuzz. I'll just collect by angel and be going..."

Kenny tries to heave Uriel up, but the angel is dead weight.

"Woah, Kenny, stay. This sounds serious."

"No, it really isn't-"

The door on Wendy/Stan's bedroom opens and Wendy comes out, bleary-eyed. "Could you guys turn down the TV, I—KENNY?"

"I was just leaving," Kenny says, tugging fruitlessly on Uriel's arm.

"No, you aren't." Stan frowns, suddenly, realizing Wendy might have a problem with this. He looks over at her. "Uh..."

Kenny looks over, too. Like any good feminist, Wendy is obligated to hate Kenny for not only knocking up a girl, but then dumping the girl for the same reason. Kenny fully expects her to kick his ass right out the second story window.

Instead, she gestures toward the couch. "No, no, Kenny, at least stay until the morning. It's late and it doesn't look like you're going to be able to get your... uh..."

"Uriel."

"Right, your Uriel off of the couch, anyway." She disappears quickly back into her bedroom, leaving both Stan and Kenny in a state of shock. Shock, but still no suspicion. We stress that you should be.

So Kenny stays the night, and tries to ward off Stan's offers of food, clothes, makeshift bed, and all other modern comforts. Eventually Stan goes to bed (Wendy immediately hangs up her cell phone when he comes in and smiles at him when he does), and Kenny is left sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, being kicked in the head every so often by Uriel. He fishes his bottle of morphine pills out of his bottle and pops a couple, then turns the TV on low and watches cartoons.

If only Kenny turned to a news channel, he would see an exposé on Ben Proutly, the "modern saint who donates to worthy causes" posing next to a little girl with some horrible disease, and see the face of the man who has it out for him. ...But he doesn't, and so remains ignorant of the true gravity the situation he is in, and has now brought Stan into.

But he does get an inkling of it the next morning when, while leaving the apartment complex with Stan and Uriel (Uriel babbling to Stan about prophets and God and finally proving those bastards Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael wrong), a nondescript van with black windows skids to a halt in front of them, the doors are thrown open, and Wendy aims a M9 double action Beretta at Kenny's head.

"Alright, boys," she says calmly. "Get in the van."

"_Wendy? What the fuck are you _**doing**?!"

"Sorry, Stan... really. You're a nice guy, and I hoped Kenny would have the decency to leave you out of this. Guess not," she adds, glaring. Kenny stares back, and Stan is in a state of the utmost bewilderment. "Now get in," Wendy repeats with a jerk of the gun, and Kenny, Stan, and Uriel climb in numbly, joining her in the back.

"Wendy, **what**-"

"We're taking a little trip to Vatican City, that's all. Mr. Proutly is waiting to see you, Kenny."

"Ooooh no," Uriel says, gnawing on his thumb nail anxiously. "Ooooh, this is not good."

Stan gives Wendy an anguished look. "How could you?"

Wendy, who is not heartless, avoids eye contact and instead glares at Kenny's left knee. "... Mr. Proutly asked me to keep you under surveillance a year ago, because he suspected you'd be the first one Kenny would run to."

Stan feels ill. "This whole time..."

The van abruptly swerves, and the front left side smashes into a fire hydrant. A jet of water immediately gushes skyward, raining down on the battered windshield and crumpled headlight. In the confusion Wendy accidently fires her gun; the bullet catches Kenny in the side of the mouth and travels at an upward slant to his brain, killing him. He slumps sideways and onto the floor while Wendy, who's shrieking, clambers out of the back of the van, runs around to the side, and throws the drivers-side door open.

"_Clyde!_ Are you okay?!"

"_CLYDE?"_

Uriel and Stan (the one who shouted in amazement), who've trampled after Wendy, stare as Clyde Jones brushes himself off. You may be protesting that Clyde's surname is Harris or, if you want to go with one of the outdated names, Donovan or Goodman. To this we can only reply: it is our story and we are going to call him whatever the hell we want. Jones happens to be a very hot last name. Jason's the funniest correspondent on the Daily Show now, and James Earl's voice was the best part of _Revenge of the Sith_... not that there was any competition.

The point is that, if we wanted, we could give Clyde a different last name every chapter. In fact... yes, we think we will.

"Uh, hey Stan."

"... I feel lightheaded," Stan says, placing a hand against his forehead.

"Don't _you_ faint," Wendy commands. "Clyde, are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine... I spilled my coffee, though," he adds with a tragic sigh.

"Well, great. This is just great. Now we have to walk to Rome. Thanks a lot, Clyde."

"You can't _walk_ to Rome."

"Stan, be quite and go get Kenny."

"Kenny's _dead._ You _shot_ him."

"Not on purpose! Like you haven't accidentally killed him a hundred times yourself. Now go get him, you're going to have to carry his corpse to the Vatican..."

"Forget it!" Stan throws up his hands and glares at her. "You left your gun in back seat and we, Uriel and me, we could take you guys. You're not taking Kenny anywhere."

"Oh, Uriel?" Wendy says, pointing over Stan's right shoulder. "You mean _that_ Uriel?"

Stan turns his head in time to see the archangel sprinting away from the three of them, abandoning Stan to his fate. He looks back and see that, while he was talking to Wendy, Clyde went and retrieved the gun.

"... fuck," Stan mumbles.


	4. There Are 500 Ways to Kill a Man Unle

Thank God for Fantastic Easter Special... I honestly had no idea where to go with this until that episode aired.

This is a longass chapter, but there was a lot to cram in. The other chapters will be shorter.

**Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone**

_04. There Are 500 Ways to Kill a Man... Unless He's Chuck Norris_

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Kenny coughs. He lifts a hand to his mouth and wipes the bloody drool away, then works his index finger around inside, scrapping fragments of teeth and hunks of tongue off of the walls and roof of his mouth, then spitting them out onto the sidewalk.

"Oh, _sick!_"

Kenny glances up and at Wendy, who looks horrified. Unsurprising. Wendy has never been up close and personal with the gorier aspects of Kenny's condition before, and it's a little much to take. Kenny decides to defuse the tension the only way he knows how: by telling an uncouth joke.

"Sooo Wendy, you got to fire a shot in me, do I get to fire a shot in you?"

Wendy gives him a disgusted/scandalized look. Kenny looks to his left and sees Stan—who is supporting him, one hand under Kenny's armpit, the other holding Kenny's arm around his shoulders—roll his eyes. Clyde Cline is on the other side of Stan, snickering, because Clyde is every bit the pervert Kenny is, but gets laid less often because of the extra stomach flab. Kenny's eyebrows shoot up.

"_Clyde?_ You're in on this?"

"Yeah," Clyde says, shrugging.

"How come?"

"Nothing better to do in South Park."

"I hear that."

"Would you stop chatting him up?" Wendy asks huffily.

"Yeah, Kenny, quit being nice to our kidnappers!" Stan protests.

"Fine. God, you both always have to have it your way," Kenny huffs. "Why'd we crash, at least?"

"_Clyde_ swerved to avoid a squirrel," Wendy says, giving him a pointed look.

"What? Roadkill makes me cry."

"_Everything_ makes you cry."

"I'll have you know I've stopped crying after sex!"

We are going to skip over the trip to Vatican city because it is long and uninteresting. The airlines refused to let them on with a gun—Wendy cursed post-9/11 protocol—and they ended up on a cruise line. Kenny and Clyde spent the time playing limbo, dancing in congo lines, and sucking tequila from the belly buttom of a Chilean transvestite. Stan and Wendy stayed by the bar, sipping mai tais and giving their companions disapproving looks. "Damn Stockholm syndrome," Wendy said, and Stan said, "Don't they realize they aren't on the same side?" and then they clinked their glasses and toasted to unreasonable friends.

See? Boring. Nearly as boring as golf.

When they arrived they were thrown into the same cages Stan spent a night in on Easter '07, and that's where we'll pick up.

"Don't even think of escaping," Wendy says. She points to an intimidating-looking man who steps out of the dark like a supervillain from a comic book that's abusing the shadow technique. "Romper here's in charge of the ninjas, and he's been teaching them the ancient art of stomping."

"That's stupid," Stan says.

"You're stupid."

"Clyde!" Kenny says, gripping the bars, "you aren't gonna leave me here, are you? We congoed! Does a limbo stick mean nothing to you?!"

"Sorry Ken," Clyde shrugs. "I'm just backing the winning horse."

"I understand," Kenny says solemnly. Stan pinches the bridge on his nose.

"Kenny, would you just shut up?" he snaps and Kenny, looking abashed, sits down and does so. Stan takes to pacing, wondering if praying to Jesus would help. After all, the last biblical figure ran anyway when he needed help.

"... Look, Stan," Kenny says after a long silence. "I'm really sorry, ya know? But you don't have anything to worry about, 'cause they're really only after me-"

"Dammit, Kenny, I don't want _you_ to get hurt, either!" Classic Good Guy Syndrome. Stan's got a bad case of it. It's incurable, but some people with it can still lead normal lives.

Stan isn't one of them, clearly.

Kenny, as you know, isn't a good guy. Drug addicts with illegitimate children they never see rarely are. So Stan's concern for his well being, even after he got Stan abducted, makes Kenny uncomfortable. Kenny fishes his morphine from his pocket and pops the child proof cap off.

"... what's that?"

"What?"

Understanding dawns. "Damn it Kenny! You told me you were clean!"

"... I did?" Of course he did. Another symptom of the disease: when Stan found out about Kenny's drug problem, he worked months to get Kenny off of it. In the end Kenny felt so badly about all the time Stan was wasting on him that he lied and told him he wasn't using anymore, and hid all his pills. When Stan left for LA he appointed himself Kenny's sponser and gave him his number in case he ever had to talk him out of a relapse.

Things would have dissolved into a fight if Clyde hadn't reappeared at that exact moment and unlocked their cell.

"What're you doing?" Romper Stomper demands, and Clyde ignores him.

"Mr. Proutly apologizes for the treatment you've received and invites you to dinner to show his hospitality," Clyde reads off of a card, holding the door of their cell open.

"_What?_"

"Mr. Proutly apologizes for-" Clyde begins to reread the card.

"Never mind," Stan says, exasperated. Clyde leads them to a dining room and long table with a delicious-looking spread. Clyde and Wendy even pull out Kenny and Stan's chairs for them. Stan looks across the table at Kenny, hoping to share a mutual expression of suspicion and concern, and is more than a little annoyed to find that Kenny is already stuffing his face.

"Where's Proutly?" Stan demands.

"He'll be here after dinner," Wendy says.

"Oh God, Stan, you have to try this. It is so fucking good."

Stan ignores Kenny. "I'm not eating anything. You could have poisoned it."

Kenny chugs his wine.

"We didn't make dinner," Wendy says, frowning. "Heidi and Shelly did. And I wouldn't _poison_ you, Stan-"

"Shut up."

"_You_ shut up!" Wendy says, offended.

Stan, however, stares. "Heidi and _who?_"

"Shelly."

Stan stares for a long while. Then he repeats, "Shut up." Wendy huffs and crosses her arms.

"Stan, seriously, this is delicious. And you've _got_ to be hungry," Kenny says, mouth full. Stan looks questioningly at Clyde, who shrugs.

"You could wait and see if Kenny keels over... but really, if we wanted to kill you, we'd have just shot you... or had Romper stomp on you."

Stan's stomach growls, and he finally digs in. And it _is_ delicious. He and Kenny eat until they're stuffed, and then they hear footsteps coming down the hall. Wendy (who was slouching against a wall) and Clyde (who was cleaning his ear with his pinky) both stand up straight, and Stan cranes his neck to see who is about to walk into the room. Kenny, who is in the process of unbuckling his belt for thirds, couldn't care less.

... And we hope it comes as no surprise to you who Ben Proutly is. If we can't pull off the obvious, we figure we will fail mightily at trying to do subtly.

It is a surprise to Stan. If his stomach weren't so weighed down with food, he would have fallen out of his seat in shock.

"_CARTMAN?!_"

"It's Proutly now," Eric Cartman—rather, Ben Proutly, but we will call him Cartman because that is how Stan and Kenny (and Wendy and Clyde, for that matter) think of him—says. He pulls out a chair at the head of the table, sits down, and folds his hands. It's a bit odd to see Cartman in a priest's getup. "Well you guys, long time no see-"

"I saw you two_ years_ ago when you I let you crash on my couch and you stole 500 dollars when you left!"

"God, Stan, you never let anything go, do you?"

"That was my gas and food money!"

"Well, I took the money and entered a beauty pageant-"

"A _beauty pageant_," Stan repeats incredulously.

"Did you win?" Kenny asks curiously, speaking for the first time.

"Kenny!"

"What?" he asks innocently.

"As a matter of fact, I _did_," Cartman says smugly. "I sabotaged those other bitches and got a check for $25000. I partied for a while, then one day I ended up in a hotel room with that mob boss that had killed twenty-six hookers. So the government put me up in witness protection, and now I'm living the sweet life," Cartman says, grinning. "I've got so much money I use it for toilet paper."

This is a brief, sanitized version of Eric Cartman's early twenties, and we will delve deeper for your benefit:

First, you should know that Cartman is very much his father's son, minus the vagina. At the age of nineteen he was having gang bangs at The Drunken Barn Dance, posing for Crack Whore Magazine, negotiating a contact for a Scheiße movie, and very routinely dressing in drag. However, you must remember that Eric Cartman is much more intelligent and conniving than Liane Cartman could ever hope to be. He was making serious money while successfully hiding his more outrageous behavior from his friends. Sure, they knew he was a bisexual with a definite tilt toward men, but that was sort of a given.

So yes, Cartman "ended up in a hotel room with that mob boss that had killed twenty-six hookers" because the mob boss had the expectation Cartman was going to blow him, but Cartman recognized him as the serial killer the moment he walked into the hotel. The truth of the matter was that Cartman orchestrated the entire thing: fed him drinks, deceived him quite easily, then bashed his face in with a lamp.

"You told Wendy to spy on me!" Stan shouts.

"Yes."

"And you recruited Clyde for... whatever the hell you're doing!"

"Yep."

"And you sent an assassin after Kenny!"

"No I didn't."

"What? ...Yes you did!"

"No, I didn't," Cartman says, scowling. "Why would I do that? The poor asshole'll just come back. It's a waste of resources."

"Hey, I'm sitting right here, asshole." Kenny sits up a little; because of all fuss made about it, he's actually gotten curious. "Then why was Mole at my house?"

"_Ooooh_," says like all has been made clear to him (and it has). "_Mole_. Well, he's a loose cannon and he just hates you. I didn't order him to do anything, he just went and shot you because he was pissed."

"Why does he hate _me?_" Kenny wonders. "I didn't even know what he looked like!"

"Well, he's British. Who knows why they do the things they do," Cartman shrugs.

"He's French, Cartman," Wendy says. Stan jumps a little. He forgot she and Clyde were still in the room.

"Whatever, Britian, France, Spain it's all the same soccer-worshipping cult," Cartman says with a careless wave of the hand. Wendy rolls her eyes but looks like she's trying to hold back a girlish giggle. Stan stares at her. She looks infatuated, and it's not a look he's used to. Poor Stan. Nice guys finish last.

"Aren't you supposed to be generous and shit?" Kenny raises an eyebrow. "How do _you_ part with money?"

"It's hard," Cartman says solemnly. "But my financial advisor assures me writing a few checks to starving Africans and terminal children will pay off in the end."

"Financial... advisor...?"

"Sure, I'll call him in," Cartman says, attempting to be casual, but clearly gleeful. Clyde leaves, and soon returns with a companion.

Stan would have been more shocked had it not been for Wendy and Cartman. Now he is only numb when he says, "_Kyle?_ What are you doing with Cartman?"

Kyle calmly adjusts his grip on the stack of folders he is carrying. "Oh, I have my reasons."

And those reasons will be relieved, but not quite yet. We assure you, it is so utterly lame that, when it is revealed, you will be wishing that we'd left it up to your imagination. For now just know that Kyle was the only one who sought Cartman out and _asked_ to join—everyone else was recruited.

And while we're on the subject, here is how the others were recruited:

When Romper Stomper turned eighteen he was released from juvie and set loose in the real world. After growing up in prison he had no real life skills, and soon fell into a life of robbing connivence stores to get by. Romper has a conscience, however, so he would often go to churches and confess. A year ago, when Cartman was first put into witness protection as a priest, before he even left for Rome, Romper happened to come into his confessional. Romper was quite glad to see him, because Cartman was the only familiar face he could look forward to. When Cartman's Grand Master Plan first began to formulate he invited Romper along, and Romper was more than glad to accompany him.

Cartman went to see Wendy on her 21st birthday party, which was coincidentally thrown the day before he left for Rome. Cartman had always been the primary reason for the off-again part of Stan and Wendy's on-again/off-again relationship. There had always been something between Wendy; whether you want to call it attraction, or admiration, or hate, it was mutual. Wendy spent the majority of high school waffling between Stan and Cartman, and on her birthday she quite definitively chose Cartman... with some Stan on the side. Cartman let Wendy in on his plan, and asked her to keep an eye on Stan, as he was the most likely person to interfere.

Clyde took Cartman up on his proposition because, as previously mentioned, Clyde was bored out of his mind in South Park. When Cartman left he took the party with him; Liane again became the reigning Dirty Slut Queen by default, and frankly she was getting on it the years. Heidi came along for similar reasons, but Cartman also promised to help her get revenge on a certain someones. Shelly—who joined the army after she was expelled from college for beating up the football captain and started drilling new recruits—joined because she liked the sound of Cartman's spiel.

There are a few more in Cartman's crew, but we won't say anything just yet so that we don't spoil their dramatic entrance. And as for Mole? Well, timing is everything. Or something like that.

"You'll never get the papacy, Cartman!" Stan snaps. "That position belongs to the descendant of Peter Rabbit!"

"Oh, yeah. Like it's so hard to take something away from a rabbit. Because they're so ferocious and their claws are so sharp," Cartman says sarcastically. "The hardest part of getting rid of the rabbits is that they're so _many _of them. Do you know how many rabbits you can get in thirteen years? I'm getting sick of eating it every day."

Stan's eyes widen. "WHAT?"

"Hey!" The door to the kitchen bursts open and Heidi stomps in. "_I'm_ getting tried of _cooking_ it, you know! I'd like to see you do better!"

"YOU FED ME THE POPE?!" Stan tries to induce vomiting. Shelly, who followed Heidi's melodramatic entrance, wrinkles her nose at her little brother and says, "God, don't be such a pussy, turd." Kenny scratches his chin and wonders if he can get the recipe without Stan freaking out.

"God, untwist your panties, Heidi," Cartman says.

"I don't get it," Kenny speaks up. "I mean, what are you trying to accomplish by becoming pope?"

"Well-" Cartman begins, and Kyle clears his throat loudly.

"Remember Peter's Evil Overlord List," he reminds him. "Revealing the grand master plan is one of the worst mistakes you can make."

"Oh, right." Cartman clears his throat. "Look, you guys, it's nothing personal but we're going to have to detain you so that you don't get all self-righteous again and try and stop me. Don't worry, you'll have plenty to eat-"

Stan takes off running. And Kenny, after pausing to lick his plate off, follows.

Cartman sighs and looks over at Kyle, Wendy, Clyde, Shelly, Romper, and Heidi. "Well?! One of you assholes go get them!"

Stan and Kenny run through halls, Stan hellbent on getting out of there, Kenny wondering why the Pope doesn't hire an interior decorator. They just burst into the foyer just as two figures clad in skimpy leather outfits clearly designed by the same comic book geek that designs heroine/villian outfits and who has never seen a real woman naked, or he'd realize boobs are subject to the law of gravity rappel down from ropes that, apparently, came out of some magical trap door in the ceiling. In any case it's off camera, so don't think about it. The first figure is none other than Lexus, former Raisins heartbreaker. She strikes a dramatic pose, supporting two huge guns effortlessly despite the lack of arm muscle on her supermodel-thin body. The second figure is much more awkward, with only one huge gun, which they are straining to lift from the ground (curse that gravity!).

Of course, this all takes several minutes to do, especially when you have it timed to a dramatic musical score, and Stan and Kenny simply run right past—though Stan takes the time to shout "You _too_, Butters?!" over his shoulder at the second figure.

Mole presents a much more real challenge, because he steps right between them and the door without theatrics. Stan and Kenny skid to a stop to avoid crashing into him.

"_You_ again," he says, glaring at Kenny.

"Get out of the way!" Stan demands, not sounding very threatening.

"You're free to go," Mole says, lifting an eyebrow at him. "I've got no quarrel with you."

"I'm not leaving without Kenny!"

Mole snorts. "Fags."

"What the hell is your problem?" Kenny demands. "Why do you hate me? I don't even know you!"

"Why? _WHY?_ You ruined my life!"

"HOW?"

"You brought me back to life after the American/Canadian war!"

Kenny stares at him. "You're pissed at me because of _that?!_"

Yes, Mole is. And we'll make sure to fully explore why... later. Or maybe not. But this is really dragging on, so we're skipping it for the moment.

Mole detaches the shovel from his back and slides into the stereotypical karate-chop pose. "Good luck getting past me. I've mastered 500 martial arts."

"Oh you have _not._"

"Yes, I have!"

"No way!"

"Yes way! I can defeat anyone! ... except Chuck Norris."

"There is no fucking way you've mastered 500 martial arts. Even if there _were_ 500 different martial arts, even if you studied 24 hours a day for every day of your life, you wouldn't have the _time_. It's not _possible_."

"Yes, it is!"

"No, it isn't!"

For those of you siding with Kenny: yes it is. So there.

The argument could have dragged on for hours if Stan didn't pick up the discarded shovel and smack Mole in the face with it. Never underestimate a nice guy pushed to the brink by shocking revelation after shocking revelation.

Stan and Kenny resume running, and run all the way to Venice, skillfully ignoring both geography and the realm of possibility for the sake of the story. We applaud them.

"Hold on, hold on," Kenny wheezes out finally. His pants are starting to slip off because he unbuckled his belt off after gorging himself, and Stan stops while he hitches his jeans back up and refastens his belt. For some reason this jostles his bottle of morphine from his pocket; he makes a grab for it, misses, and it falls into the water.

"Let it go, man," Stan starts to say, making a grab for his sleeve, but Kenny shakes him off and dives in after it. He loses it and, his muscles too exhausted from the run to swim, floats along the canals and out to sea. He bobs along with the waves until he washes up on an island. Kenny is so amazed, so stunned to have survived the ordeal, that he dies of shock.


	5. If You're Old Enough to Remember Fraggle

Sorry 'bout the wait, you guys... went on hiatus for school, then I sort of forgot what I had plotted out for this story and got distracted by 90s sitcoms. So now I'm winging it.

**Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone**

_05. If You're Old Enough to Remember Fraggle Rock, You're Probably too Old to be Reading South Park Fanfiction_

-

-

Kenny McCormick is dangling ten feet above the ground, bound by an ankle to a higher-off-the-ground-than-ten-feet tree limb with an impromptu vine rope. Kenny has no idea what is going on, in part because his upside-down state has made both his clothing and his blood collect at his head, so he's got a head rush and is trapped inside a hot, musky shirt. The main reason for his disorientation, however, is that his heart only started beating when you started reading this paragraph.

To make things clear (to you, not Kenny; poor boy doesn't get the narration of his life, and so has no idea a rogue mosquito is about to bite his exposed stomach): Kenny's corpse was collected from the coast and strung up for future consumption. In a short while he will gallantly fight off ravenous monsters, that is to say, he will run away and hide. He will not leave the island alive, but he will leave the island. In a longer while he will see his illegitimate son, and in an even longer while Kyle will throw up on a plastic plant in his presence.

How's that for foreshadowing?

But for the moment, Kenny is trying to contort his body in such a way as to reach the rope vine tied around his ankle. His limbs flail about wildly—the three unbound ones futilely—and the strain on the tree limb he is tied to (for it wasn't a very strong tree limb, but bless his little captors' hearts, they tried) causes it to snap; Kenny falls to the earth and is hit on the head by the branch.

"... owch," Kenny grunts, nose in the mud. "OWCH," he says again when someone—technically something—jabs him rather hard in the ribs with stick. Kenny had not the strength to lift his head (which still had the tree branch laying on it), but he overhears the following conversation:

"I told you he was still alive, Gobo!"

"Impossible, Red! I checked! He was dead! How could something that _was_ dead now be alive?"

"Uh... well... you're both right..."

"Oh shut up, Wembley!"

"It's some sort of monster, come to slash and kill us all! Oh, Fraggle blood shall pour forth into the sea! The end of days is upon us! Repent sinners, our God has forsaken us! ¿Porqué dios? ¿¡PORQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?!"

"Oh God, you just _had_ to set Boober off."

"Shut up, the lot of ya! Help me carry him to Madame Trash Heap, she'll know what to do."

They may as well have been speaking Chinese with a lisp, for all the sense it made to Kenny. You see, Kenny doesn't have easy access to wikipedia, and thus doesn't know he has washed up on Fraggle Rock, "a colorful and fun world, but also a world with a relatively complex system of symbiotic relationships between different "races" of creatures, an allegory to the human world, where each group was somewhat unaware of how interconnected and important they were to one another."

So speaketh the wikipedians, dispensers of knowledge, editors of fact, and source of mockery for Stephen Colbert. But this here's the real world, and no human allegory is complete without a hefty dose of hostility.

So Kenny gets dragged to a mutated, talking compost heap, and the rest of the Fraggles gather to decide if they should throw the monster back into the sea from whence it came, or kill it and eat it and be endowed with its magical powers to reincarnate, thus ensured that the Fraggles would rule Fraggle Rock with an unsuppressable regime. In due time the Doozers and Gorgs appear, because an island economy can only support so much, so each race wanted to hoard as much as possible in case one of those other bastard races tried to take more than their fair share. Tempers flared; ethnic slurs would have been thrown back and forth if the words "fraggle", "doozer", and "gorg" didn't already sound like ethnic slurs. Someone threw a radish. Then all hell broke loose.

Kenny snuck off and hid in the bushes, staring at the bloody massacre playing out before him. Unnaturally-colored fur flew all over the place. Googly eyes rolled back in heads. Everywhere fuzzy little creatures where being strangled with wires.

Kenny would have managed to sneak off alive if he hadn't been overcome at that moment to scratch his stomach, which, for some unfathomable reason, felt unbearably itchy. He scratched, and the movement attracted the attention of someone in the fray, and then Kenny was smacked on the head with a well-thrown radish. He fell backwards over a conveniently placed cliff and was dashed to pieces on the rocks. Eventually the tide rose, and what was left of him was washed out to sea.

Who knows how long he floated out there, drifting along. (Well, we do, but... meh.) Fish came along and nibbled at his remains, and a dolphin came by and tried to have sex with him (dolphins do this. Sea turtles, plastic bags... they're horny little bastards). Eventually, Kenny's body reconstructed itself and he came back to life, but remained unconscious.

And because we want him to, Kenny washes up in Denver. When he comes to he discovers an address written on his palm and exactly the amount of money he needs to take a cab there in his pocket, because we want him to. Our whims transcend the realm of reality.

What Kenny doesn't realize until he steps out of the cab is that the address is that of his ex-girlfriend, the one he dumped after she refused to get an abortion. Kenny groans, but is compelled to walk up the front steps and knock on the front door by some force he doesn't understand. That force being us. As if you didn't know.

And we hope you also know who Kenny's ex-girlfriend is. We worried over Wendy giving too obvious a hint, and then not enough. We are going for blatant storytelling, after all.

So footsteps approach, the knob turns, Kenny considers diving off the poach and hiding in the bushes (again), but oh, too late, the door opens and Kenny's ex-girlfriend stares at Kenny.

"_KENNY?_" she asks, just to make sure.

"Hey, Bebe," Kenny says, resigned.

We'd end the chapter here, but we realize you're probably curious as to what Stan did after Kenny's untimely tumble into the sea, and what Cartman did after they both ran out of the vatican, so:

Stan bought a plane ticket, had an uncomfortable flight because he ended up sitting next to the same Chilean transvestite Clyde and Kenny got drunk off of on their way to the vatican, and flew to Manhattan. He ran all the way to the person he always runs to when he has problems: Kyle.

Now wait a minute, you're probably saying, last chapter Kyle was an evil backstabbing ho-bag. This story is as inconsistent as the show itself! To this we say: Stan ran to Kyle Broflovski. The person who joined Cartman's undisclosed evil plot was Kyle Schwartz, aka Kyle 1, aka Kyle's cousin Kyle.

We told you it'd be lame. Don't say we didn't warn you.

And speaking of Cartman and his posse:

Cartman was quite annoyed when his band of miscreants told him Stan and Kenny had gotten away, by which we mean, he threw a hissy fit of epic proportions and hit Butters for not rappelling fast enough. (But Lexus cuddled him afterward, so he didn't suffer too much.) Once Cartman had screamed himself hoarse, he sat down and linked his fingers in a classically evil way.

"Since you dumbasses are incapable of stopping those two assholes, I have little choice. It's time to call in... the professionals."

Oh, the suspense.


	6. Dear Jews: Sorry 'Bout the Persecution

Only one chapter left.

**Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone**

_06. Dear Jews: Sorry 'Bout the Persecution. No Hard Feelings? Signed, God_

-

-

"Well, I never expected to see you again."

"Yeah... me, neither."

Kenny is seated in Bebe's living room, holding a cup of lukewarm tea. He's a little afraid to drink it, not knowing if Bebe is angry enough to add a little rat poison to the mix. As for Bebe, she's sipping it through pursed lips, glaring at him over the rim. There are toys scattered about the floor, like a big flashing sign that says "YOUR SON IS HERE."

Kenny clears his throat. "Look, I'm not going to pretend I haven't made a few mistakes in my life, but you _knew_ I never wanted kids. I told you what horrible parents mine were, and I thought you got me. I thought _you_ didn't want kids, either. You were always talking about pursuing a career. I thought we were on the same page. And then you turn around and tell me you're not getting an abortion—"

"Kenny!" Bebe snapped, slamming down her tea cup. "I DID get an abortion!"

Kenny snorts. "Oh, my mistake. I guess I just got confused when you continued to inflate for nine months then went into labor."

"FOUR TIMES, Kenny! I had an abortion FOUR TIMES before I came to you and told you I couldn't! Whatever... _disease_ you have, you gave it to Halden!"

He stares at Bebe. "... Oh."

"And, God, the SIDS! Every other week! And the colic, and the pneumonia... I didn't know what to do! You were the _only_ person that understood that... that _condition_, and you were too busy getting high and slicing your throat on stage to give a crap about what I was going through!"

Bebe angrily grabs her tea cup and Kenny's and storms out of the room into the kitchen. Kenny sinks back into the couch, stunned, and almost jumps when something grabs his leg. He looks down, and lo and behold, for the first time in his life he lays eyes on his toddler son.

"... Oh."

The boy looks remarkably like Kenny, with more wave in his hair, undoubtedly influenced by Bebe's unruly mass of curls. Kenny can hear her in the kitchen, viciously cleaning dishes.

"So," Kenny says, for lack of anything better to say, "Halden Stevens, uh? Sorry you got saddled with such a white trash name."

The kid starts gnawing, and drooling, on Kenny's leg. Kenny sighs.

"I know I'm coming across as an asshole, kid, but seriously... you're better off without me. I'm not exactly a role model. Christ, look at how much I fucked up Stan's life just by being there. I'd do the same thing to you."

Bebe reenters the room, picks up Halden, and gives Kenny a hard look.

"I think it would be better if you just left, Kenny."

"Yeah," Kenny agrees, and lets himself out. He walks to the local hospital, pretends to be a grieving loved one, is led to an unconscious old man's room, and, once alone, steals his morphine drip. While in a drugged stupor Kenny contemplates that, if he were the kind of man that could settle down with one girl, Bebe would have been that girl—but he's not that kind of man.

And as for Stan and Kyle:

"Dude, I just don't want any part of it," Kyle says, waiting for the crosswalk light to change.

"But Kyle, it's _Cartman_. He's trying to become the Pope for some reason that hasn't been explained yet but probably will when we reunite!" Stan says while they enter the airport.

"Why should I care? I'm not Catholic."

"But he killed the other Pope... and _fed it to me_," Stan protests.

"I'm sorry about that, Stan, but I just don't want to get involved. The last time I did, I ended up stabbing Jesus in the neck."

"Uh... what?"

"Oh, didn't I ever mention that?"

"Look, man, as I understand it, Kenny is a prophet and Cartman's plan somehow includes getting him out of the way."

"Kenny, a prophet? I very much doubt that." Kyle handed Stan a carry-on bag he'd stuffed full of necessities and the plane ticket he'd printed off of online. "Look, Stan, I'm helping you get back to L.A., and that's it. I've got a nine to five job I don't want to lose, and besides, we're in our twenties now. Don't you think we're getting just a little too old for this shit?"

Stan sighed. "But... Wendy betrayed me. There's nothing left for me in L.A."

"Except the career you've been pursuing for a year and a roommate who shouldn't get saddled with three times the rent he's used to without any warning or notice."

Kyle was always good at manipulating Stan's Good Guyitis. And since Stan can't in good conscience abandon Loren Swanson, he nods. (Bet you forgot about him, uh? Sadly, the world would have remembered him for his contribution to American literature if Stan had just stayed out of L.A.)

Kyle waits with Stan until he boards his plane, then takes a taxi home.

And this is where we intervene.

"Hello, Kyle."

Kyle looks around, startled, but of course doesn't see the source of the voice.

"No, you're not crazy," we assure him. "This is God."

Oh, I bet you didn't see that coming, did you? Well, what better narrator than the one that knows everything everyone is thinking and can manipulate time and space to suit the story? Incidentally, we _do_ love Pope jokes. Here's one: What happened to the Pope when he went to Mount Olive? We'll let you ponder that until the next chapter.

"No way," Kyle protests to his empty apartment, because we want him to. "Prove it."

And because we want him to want us to prove it, we do: we endow him with the knowledge of 501 martial arts; we change him from straight to gay just long enough to picture several old male friends in that way, then back to straight again; we erase Uriel's existence from the story; and we take him from Fraggle Rock to the moon to a year ago in a hotel room just in time to see Cartman, elaborately dressed in drag, bash the back of a drunken mob boss' skull in, back to Kyle's own apartment in present time. He curls on the floor, his senses assulted, vaguely attracted to Bob Woodruff, and concedes that we are, in fact, God.

"What do you want with me?" he asks, which is a fair question.

"Kyle," we tell him, "Kenny isn't a prophet."

"Ha," Kyle says. "Called it."

"You are."

"I'm sorry?" Kyle says, desiring clarification because we desire him to desire clarification, so that we may clarify it not only for him, but for you as well.

"When Uriel heard Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael talking, he caught snatches of it and thought what they were saying was that Kenny was a prophet, and that Cartman wanted to kill him so that he wouldn't lose followers when he became Pope. In actuality, they were discussing you, and who should be sent to help you stop Cartman from enacting his master plan. Uriel decided to beat Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael to the punch, and he left immediately to watch over Kenny."

"I still don't get it."

"Cartman doesn't know you're a prophet—he just wants to kill you. By complete coincidence, you're the only one that can stop him, and fulfilling his dream of killing you would eliminate the only threat to him becoming Pope. He asked Wendy to spy on Stan because he knew Stan would make the biggest fuss if he tried to kill _you,_ not Kenny. Wendy was just bitter about how Kenny treated Bebe and thought they could lock them up to lure you out, and keep them from assisting you."

"But why did Uriel think it was Kenny they were talking about?"

"Because he heard Kenny's name. Actually, Kenny is a demigod, not a prophet."

"You gotta be shitting me."

"I shit you not."

So we allow Kyle to know what becomes of Halden Stevens: that he starts out virtuous, working in a hospital and donating body parts for transplant nearly everyday, as well as draining his body of blood. However, while Kenny's experience of growing up below the poverty line humbled him, Halden's middle-class existence made him develop (ironically) a God complex. In the end, the Super Best Friends freeze him using Joseph Smith's ice breath, and Santa keeps him locked up in his fortress of solitude. They would have killed him if Kenny hadn't pled on Halden's behalf, and they only agreed to it on the condition he join up. At the age of 45, Kenny finally accepts his superhuman status and gets clean, thanks to the Super Best Friends' taser-method of rehabilitation.

"So what do I do now?" Kyle wonders. We send him to a motel in Denver and, for good measure, put him in a martial arts getup.

Kenny happens to exit his motel room the moment Kyle appears and Kyle, sickened a little by the whole experience and startled to see Kenny after his brief, gay fantasies, throws up in the plastic plants.


End file.
